gyulai1 hour ago
> The EU trails the US not only in the absolute number of AI-related patents but also in AI specialisation – the share of AI patents relative to total patents.

E.U. patent law takes a very different attitude towards software patents than the U.S. Even if that wasn't the case: “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing? Not something you can just throw out there as a presupposition without explaining your reasoning.

eternauta3k23 minutes ago
EU firms don't file EU patents necessarily, but rather in the relevant countries (including USA).
irjustin5 hours ago
FWIW, these studies are too early. Large orgs have very sensitive data privacy considerations and they're only right now going through the evaluation cycles.

Case in point, this past week, I learned Deloitte only recently gave the approval in picking Gemini as their AI platform. Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can imagine is going to take a while.

To say "AI is failing to deliver" because only 4% efficiency increase is a pre-mature conclusion.

shakna1 hour ago
> Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can

If rollout at Deloitte has not yet begun... How on earth did this clusterfuck [0] happen?

> Deloitte’s member firm in Australia will pay the government a partial refund for a $290,000 report that contained alleged AI-generated errors, including references to non-existent academic research papers and a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment.

[0] https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/deloitte-ai-australia-governm...

fhd21 hour ago
Because even if an organisation hasn't rolled out generative AI tools and policies centrally yet, individuals might just use their personal plans anyway (potentially in violation with their contract)? I believe that's called "shadow AI".
bojan1 hour ago
Correct. Where I work we are only "allowed" to use AI since December 2025.

But obviously people were copy/pasting content to ChatGPT and Claude long before that.

gwern4 hours ago
I'm not sure this is even measuring LLMs in the first place! They say the definition is "big data analytics and AI".

Is putting Google Analytics onto your website and pulling a report 'big data analytics'...?

yoyohello134 hours ago
Exactly, my company started carefully dipping their toes in to org wide AI mid last year (IT has been experimenting earlier than that, but under pretty strict guidelines from infosec). There is so much compliance and data privacy considerations involved.

And for the record I think they are absolutely right to be cautious, a mistake in my industry can be disastrous so a considered approach to integrating this stuff is absolutely warranted. Most established companies outside of tech really can’t have the “move fast break things” mindset.

PeterStuer4 hours ago
Meanwhile, "shadow" AI use is around 90%. And if you guess IT would lead the pack on that, you are wrong. It's actually sales and hr that are the most avid unsactioned AI tool users.
mns35 minutes ago
What do you mean? Deloitte has been all in on Microsoft AI offerings for quite some time, people have access to a lot of AI tools through MS.
oblio22 minutes ago
Did they communicate this from the top or just turn a blind eye to it?
mns3 minutes ago
They had official trainings on how to use Copilot/ChatGPT and some other tools, security and safety trainings and so on, this is not some people deciding to use whatever feature was there from Ms by default.
SiempreViernes1 hour ago
OpenAI is buying up like half of the RAM production in the world, presumably on the basis of how great the productivity boost is, so from that perspective this doesn't seem any more premature than the OpenAI scaling plan. And the OpenAI scaling plan is like all the growth in the US economy...
vjk8002 hours ago
Yeah. We are only just beginning to get the most out of the internet, and the WWW was invented almost 40 years ago - other parts of it even earlier. Adoption takes time, not to speak of the fact that the technology itself is still developing quickly and might see more and more use cases when it gets better.
otabdeveloper445 minutes ago
> We are only just beginning to get the most out of the internet

"The Internet" is completely dead. Both as an idea and as a practical implementation.

No, Google/Meta/Netflix is not the "world wide web", they're a new iteration of AOL and CompuServe.

realusername2 hours ago
Looking at the study, +4% is what they get when they chose to adopt AI, not overall.
jonathanstrange20 minutes ago
As a counter-point, someone from SAP in Walldorf told me they have access to all models by all companies to their choosing, at a more or less unlimited rate. Don't quote me on that, though, maybe I misunderstood him, it was in a private conversation. Anyway, it sounded like they're using AI heavily.
AIorNot4 hours ago
Yes I was recently talking to a person who was working as a BA who specializes in corporate AI adoption- they didn’t realize you could post screenshots to ChatGPT

These are not the openclaw folks

amarant4 hours ago
What does it even mean to specialise in something and know so little about it? What exactly is this BA person doing?

Genuinely confused, I don't get it

shermantanktop4 hours ago
The “corporate” in “corporate AI” can mean tons of work building metrics decks, collecting pain points from users, negotiating with vendors…none of which requires you to understand the actual tool capabilities. For a big company with enough of a push behind it, that’s probably a whole team, none of whom know what they are actually promoting very well.

It’s good money if you can live with yourself, and a mortgage and tuitions make it easy to ignore what you are becoming. I lived that for a few years and then jumped off that train.

monkpit4 hours ago
Sounds like a perfect job for AI!
aregue17 minutes ago
I cannot read the paper that this article is based on, but it seems that it refers to the use of big data analytics and AI in 2024, not LLM. It concludes that the use of AI leads to a 4% increase in productivity. Nowadays the debate over AI productivity centers around LLMs, not big data analytics. This article does not seem to contradict more recent findings that LLM do not (yet) provide any increased productivity at the company level.
m4635 hours ago
I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things.

Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away.

for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.

monkpit4 hours ago
The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks
Wobbles422 hours ago
The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years.

Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable.

I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.

adrianN1 hour ago
AI automates spam generation so more than likely all hope is lost for the human driven web.
kakacik10 minutes ago
Too much money in ads, and search is just a huge cash pipeline straight towards it. No way we can have non-ad-infested llm search out in the wild from any major vendor in upcoming future. Google-fu just becomes llm-google-fu, while sometimes it goes off rails and then apologizes in that typical super annoying way (and screws up something else).

Maybe smaller ones can somehow provide almost comparable but ad-free service, heck even mildly worse but genuine results would win many people over, this one included.

Antibabelic1 hour ago
When did this happen? I do exact searches on Google almost every day and it seems to honor the quotation marks just fine for me.
shakna1 hour ago
At least 2022, if not earlier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535

Antibabelic23 minutes ago
The thread seems to be about the opposite problem. The OP can't find the page they're looking for because Google is too strict about whitespace, according to the top comment.
kdheiwns43 minutes ago
I used to be able to google a question like that and get an accurate answer within the top 3 results nearly every time about 20 years ago. Then it got worse and worse and became pretty much completely useless about 10 years ago.

Now AI will give me a confident answer that is outright wrong 20% of the time or kind of right but not really 30% of the time. So now I ask something using an AI chatbot and carefully word it so as to have it not get off topic and focus on what I actually want to know, wait 30 seconds for its long ass answer to finish, skim it for the relevant parts, then google the answer and try to see where the AI sourced its answer from and determine whether it misinterpreted/mixed up results or it's accurate. What used to be a 10 second google search is now a 2-3 minute exercise.

I can see very much how people say AI has somehow led to productivity losses. It's shit like this, and it floods the internet and makes real info harder to find, making this cycle worse and worse and take more and more time for basic stuff.

fifilura43 minutes ago
My mother lost her phone so I asked her to search for "find my iphone" on Google.

The result started with 3 "sponsored links" which threw her down the rabbit hole.

This used to be easy.

gtowey5 hours ago
I was just thinking exactly the same. Basic web search has become so horrible that AI is being used as its replacement.

I found it a sad condemnation of how far the tech industry has fallen into enshittification and is failing to provide tools that are actually useful.

gh0stcat4 hours ago
We always had the technology to do things better, it's the money making part that has made things worse technologically speaking. In this same way, I don't see how AI will resolve the problem - our productivity was never the goal, and that won't change any time soon.
johnnyanmac4 hours ago
And it'll happen again when AI models start resorting to ads once again.
emptybits4 hours ago
Yup. Any LLM recommendation for a product or service should be viewed with suspicion (no different than web search results or asking a commission-based human their opinion). Sponsored placements. Affiliate links. Etc.

Or when asking an LLM for a comparison matrix or pros and cons between choices ... beware paid placements or sponsors. Bias could be a result of available training data (forgivable?) or due to paid prioritization (or de-prioritizing of competitors!)

Wobbles422 hours ago
Their tools are very useful. To their customers. Not to their users.
aurareturn2 hours ago

   then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things
It didn't decline because of this. It declined because of a general decade long trend of websites becoming paywalled and hidden behind a login. The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers.

In the 2000s, everything was open because of the ad driven model. Then ad blockers, mobile subscription model, and the dominance of a few apps such as Instagram and Youtube sucking up all the ad revenue made having an open web unsustainable.

How many Hacker News style open forums are left? Most open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc. The only reason HN is alive is because HN doesn't make need to make money. It's an ad for Y Combinator.

SEO only became an issue when all there is for crawlers is SEO content instead of true genuine content.

adrianN12 minutes ago
I seem to remember very few ads on the early web. Most sites I frequented were run by volunteers who paid out of their own pockets for webspace.
8cvor6j844qw_d64 hours ago
Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount.

For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.

entropyneur20 minutes ago
Why is it depressing? Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving, I wouldn't want to do a job that a robot could do instead just so that I could be kept busy. That sounds like an insult to human dignity tbh.
EliRivers1 hour ago
Apropos, I once had a boss who said he was running a headcount reduction pilot and anyone who had the time and availability to help him should email him saying how much time they had to spare. I cannot deny this had a satisfying elegance.
MrDresden18 minutes ago
Except it is a horrible metric to determine who is the least effective in an org and should be cut.
hackit22 hours ago
I've all-ways asked the managers can you kindly disclose all confidential business information. In which they obviously respond with condescending remarks. Then I respond with, then how am I going to give you a answer without all the knowledge of how the business runs and operates? You can go away and figure out what is going to make work for the business then you can delegate what you want me to do, it is the reason why you pay me money.
mmarian43 minutes ago
Never seen it actually work though...incentives matter.
zihotki1 hour ago
Suggest replacing managers with AI
Wobbles422 hours ago
"Ideas for AI to help reduce headcount" sounds like the title everyone should start using on resignation letters.

If anyone still resigns that is. They seem to have automated that too.

andsoitis2 hours ago
> Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount.

If the manager doesn’t have ideas, it is they who deserve the boot.

wiseowise12 minutes ago
Manager is to manage optimal delivery, not coming up with ideas.
smartmic1 hour ago
What stands out for me is that the productivity gains for small and medium-sized enterprises are actually negative. But in Germany, for example, these companies are the backbone of the entire economy. That means it would be interesting to know how the average was calculated, what method was used, what weighting was applied, etc.

All in all, it's an interesting study, but it leaves out a lot, such as long-term effects, new dependencies, loss of skills, employee motivation, and much more.

yorwba1 hour ago
Of note, "AI adoption" here means using "technologies that intelligently automate tasks and provide insights that augment human decision making, like machine learning, robotic process automation, natural language processing (NLP), algorithms, neural networks" and not just LLMs.
FanaHOVA3 hours ago
You know it's a EU study because they bring up "AI patents" in the first 2 minutes of it, as if they mean anything
lifestyleguru3 hours ago
AI is affecting everything the same as Covid, as we've been in one single-topic hysteria since 2020. With one short break for attaching bottle caps to their bottles.

Not even Russian invasion or collapse of their automotive industry rattled them.